(time) It is hard to imagine more ill-fated births than those of Kerstin, Stefan and Felix Fritzl. In 1984, their father, Josef, the authoritarian patriarch of an already sprawling Austrian family, locked his teenage daughter Elisabeth into a converted nuclear shelter underneath his house in the town of Amstetten so he could rape her at will. His incestuous abuse led to the birth of seven children, three of whom he kept imprisoned underground with their mother. Until April 26, when Austrian authorities discovered Fritzl's lair, reality for those children stretched no further than their dank, windowless confines, their mother's memories of the outside, and a television set. From this subterranean realm, Felix, 5, Stefan, 18, and Kerstin, 19, have now come blinking into the world. While Austria recoils in horror at the crime that produced the children, and grapples with how it remained undiscovered for so long, the Fritzls have a more basic challenge ahead of them: survival. Can children constrained to such a stunted sphere adjust to the world's cacophony? And what can modern science and medicine do to help? The condition of the oldest child, Kerstin, demonstrates the physical insults of a life so confined. Ravaged by an unidentified infection, she is currently in a medically induced coma. There have been reports that, despite her youth, many of her teeth are missing. Stefan has fared somewhat better, although his skin, like that of his siblings, is ghostly pale. Life in a warren of narrow corridors and low ceilings has damaged the spatial orientation of Stefan and Felix, and there may be more serious consequences for all three: health experts say a chronic lack of sunlight and exercise can leave children's bones pliable, their muscles weak and their eyes overly sensitive to strong light.

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